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Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature n 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. "Endgame, " originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

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Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation) Original Language: French
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About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.
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More About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1927. His made his poetry debut in 1930 with Whoroscope and followed it with essays and two novels before World War Two. He wrote one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, in 1949 but it wasn't published in English until 1954. Waiting for Godot brought Beckett international fame and firmly established him as a leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett continued to write prolifically for radio, TV and the theatre until his death in 1989.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I am no literary critic, but after reading Waiting for Godot, I sought more of his works. Beckett smashes everyday reality with a sledgehammer, wrecking the fantasy of social reality as we know it. The pointless circular conversations between Hamm and Clov are pathetic, useless, and point to the madness we engage in everyday, living in our own self created fantasies. We try to communicate with others , but in a sense we are only inflicting our own psychosis on each other, selfishly engaging in social ritual for some kind of perverse gratification. Of course this is only one take on life, only one way of viewing it. And like Elutheria and Godot, it is a dark vision. But to confront the deepest anxiety and emptiness within, a dark path is the only road to follow. Act Without Words is the first mime I have ever read. Seemingly simple, it also attempts to paint a picture of the futility and hoplessness of life, everything the mime reaches for he can never get, always tantilizingly out of reach. So with satisfaction and everything else in life it is always just over the horizon. Although others have interpreted this sense of need in other ways, sometimes more positively, Beckett shows it in an aweful light, leaving the reader with an empty yearning for something that can never be satisfied.

'endgame' is one of Beckett's most famous works, generally considered to be his theatrical masterpiece, as a master and servant fight it out at the end of the world in somebody's decaying head. Despite some very gallows humour, this is the Beckett aesthetic at its bleakest.'Act Without Words' is very different. The philosophy may be familiar - man's struggles to survive in a world powered by unseen, malevolent, sadistic forces - but this is treated almost (self?) parodically. The play's main interest lies in its form. Throughout his career, Beckett has been paring down his language to the limits of concision - here he finally abandons it, giving us a mime more than a little influenced by the slapstick silent cinema that has always fuelled his work. I guess this is genuinely a case where you have to see it to appreciate it, but I had fun imagining proto-Beckett Buster Keaton in the role.

In "King Lear" Shakespeare asked far more questions than he could answer, and by the end of the play little was resolved: unfit leaders would perpetuate the march of folly. Shakespeare's work followed many themes from "Oedipus" and both spoke to the ethos of their times. If any twentieth century play deserves to be considered the heir to "Oedipus" and "Lear" then Beckett's "Endgame" should rank right along with the other two. In Beckett's finest theatrical work, he places a blind man in Job's world, but in this case there is no answer from the heavens; instead Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell have to invent their own worlds, reconstructing the past and deconstructing themselves while Beckett himself reconstructs and deconstructs theater. One line best sums up the play and provides probably the best motto for the twentieth century: "the end is in the beginning and yet you go on." Many have seen this play as a dar! k Kafkaesque nighmare, but I see it as a true existential affirmation of what Camus saw as acting in good faith--choosing to play the game and go on with life even though there is little reason to play on.

What the audience is met with is full-blown confusion. Thefirst scene opens with a brief tableau, a frozen frame depicting thetwo main character Clov and Hamm, the latter confined to a chair and the other dressed in shabby clothes, face expressionless, standing and looking into the audience. Beckett intends for the audience to be shocked and to be left unrestful. Beckett wrote Endgame to illustrate human suffering and the meaninglessness of routine. People who are not courageous enough to experience anything other than the monotony of life, people who lack any imagination and creativity. It is the extent of unfeelingness and total oblivion of emotions that detaches the characters in the play from what we may perceive as "realistic". On the first reading, one may be put off entirely by the repetitive questions and actions but with a closer second reading, the quality of Beckett's dramatic technique becomes palpable. Beckett's ingenuity of writing a play devoid of a plot shows that a dramamtist is not always bound to plot as most people assume. Anyway, here is a quote from the play to consider: "All life long the same questions, the same answers..........have you not have enough of this..this...this thing?"

This play is mythical for some but it has a less eschatological meaning than "Waiting for Godot". It is more locked up in an individual personality. As much as "Waiting for Godot" could have been seen as deeply schizophrenic, "Endgame" is psychotic, a psychotic vision of the isolated individual in some kind of more than self-centered, in fact self-locked psyche, locked onto himself by himself. And of course we remain in a, obsessively male-dominated world.

There are officially four characters. But in fact two are really active. In the dustbins you have Nagg the father and Nell the mother of Hamm, a crippled and blind individual who is more or less the father of Clov who is his slave, younger, physically active though entirely dependent but maybe not forever.

The room in which these characters exist is a miniature of the psychology of a person who is completely cut off from the world. This person is Hamm. We are inside his brain. For him the world is dead, though he is the one who is a living dead since he is crippled, i.e. unable to move, and blind, i.e. unable to see. He has to be moved around and someone has to see for him and tell him what can be seen. The room has an outside kitchen, an extension that is not the outside world but that is reachable only to one character, Clov who goes to it now and then, though it is the Arlésienne of the play, the one utem you speak if constantly but never see.

Hamm henceforth asks his son Clov to check the world through windows that are too high for direct vision, built too high since windows don't grow on houses that don't grow naturally in the earth, hence purposely positioned too high.Read more ›